From cold calling to relationship building through contact center

How often does it happen that you are in the office, maybe exchanging a joke with colleagues, or trying to get your head round a report, and you’re interrupted by a bank agent calling you up to pitch yet another credit card, or some other “exciting” service you aren’t remotely interested in? And how many tactics have you used to dodge those calls? The list is endless: the need to go into a meeting, pretending they’re reached an out-of-date number, faking your own death… OK, maybe the last one is just me.

Dislike for this type of intrusive cold-calling is pretty universal though. In the UK, BT is introducing its “Choose to Refuse” service, allowing users to block annoying and unwanted incoming calls from specific numbers. Good news for the consumer, perhaps, but not such good news for organizations that have put a lot of effort into designing and tailoring an attractive offering, one that their customers may well be introducing in hearing about – but only if they are approached in the right way.

Ultimately, getting the approach wrong is what is really causing annoyance. It is understandable that organizations who want to market new products and services want to leverage their existing database of existing and potential clients – that’s why they invested in building those resources in the first place. Businesses today sit on a tremendous amount of customer data, collected from the different touch points they use to interact with them, whether that is e-mail, voice, chat, web or whatever.

What too many businesses are doing with this data today is contact en masse all the contacts they have assembled with offers that may or may not be relevant to them – which is why people end up avoiding their calls. The end result can be a lot worse than a wasted call; this type of approach can do severe damage to a company’s reputation, with customers literally going out of their way to avoid contact with them.

Predictive analytics is the answer. With the tools that are available today for the contact center environment, the mass approach is totally avoidable – but only if an organization has integrated its contact center with other communication and marketing channels, and is prepared to deliver a true Omni-channel experience.

In today’s customer environment, that should be a pre-requisite. From there, an enterprise can really crunch its data, allowing it intelligently identify the buying habits of customers, and their likes and dislikes: how they like to be contacted and when, how they engaged previously, and what is likely going to trigger their interest. By efficiently managing contact center resources and enabling agents to have the “right” conversation with the “right” customers, organizations can boost sales, enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, and, ultimately, grow their bottom line.

Organizations that adopt this approach are moving from the contact center environment into the world of the “relationship center” – a term that covers a number of meanings: mutual understanding of what is important, appreciation and respect of likes and dislikes, delivering value to both parties, and, eventually, building long-term relationships that are extremely hard to break.

Avaya has built the tools that deliver predictive analytics – we can help enterprises to seamlessly crunch and segment their massive pools of data and enable software tools to predict customers’ needs and behaviors. These can then be linked to the ongoing development of products and services, and finally, create an ecosystem within the organization that is continuously in-motion, reaching out to every customer differently, as they want it and with what they want.

So, hopefully, the next time my bank calls me, it will be contacting me before my annual trip to the UK to offer me a card with a loyalty reward program that covers my favorite UK brands. And that will be an offer I really can’t refuse.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETTelecom.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETTelecom.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

Johnson Varkey has extensive experience in telecom, collaboration and customer experience management. He previously worked with Cisco Systems and was reposnsible for driving Show more.. contact center sales.